Assassin

Chapter Thirty-Nine

London

ALEXANDER HAWKE AND AMBROSE CONGREVE ARRIVED AT the world-famous black door at precisely eleven o’clock in the morning. Hawke had been to a number of state dinners and meetings at No. 10 Downing, but it was a first visit for Ambrose Congreve. The worldly detective had feigned nonchalance all morning, but his best navy chalk-striped suit, Windsor-knotted regimental tie, and highly polished Peale wing-tipped shoes belied his efforts. He was even wearing, Hawke noticed with some amusement, his favorite brown trilby.

For a man who prided himself on his sartorial indifference, Congreve was surprisingly à la mode on this sunny morning in July. His socks even matched. Bright yellow.

“You look festive this morning,” Hawke said, nodding in his direction.

“Festive?”

“Hmm,” Hawke murmured.

“May I quote Thomas Jefferson?”

“Always.”

“On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

Ambrose drew himself up, adjusted the round, tortoiseshell spectacles perched at the tip of his nose, bent, and carefully inspected the lion’s head brass knocker, brass numbers, and the letterbox inscribed “First Lord of the Treasury.”

“You know why that particular title is there?” Ambrose said, pointing to the letterbox.

“No,” Hawke replied. “No idea.”

“Ah. Dates from 1760, when the Duke of Newcastle was prime minister. He was also first lord of the treasury. All subsequent prime ministers have resided here at No. 10 by their right as first lord of the treasury.”

“Imagine that.”

The discreet black door, once wooden, now Kevlar, swung open.

Hawke and Congreve were escorted across the black and white checkered entrance hall to a small alcove containing some modern British sculpture. Their escort, a rather severe gentleman in a cutaway over a starched white bibfront, bowed slightly and departed to attend to far more pressing and important business, as an attractive young female staff member approached with her hand extended. “Good morning,” Hawke said, shaking her cool hand.

“Lord Hawke, how do you do? And Inspector Congreve,” the pretty brunette said, “What an honor. We’re delighted to have you gentlemen here at the prime minister’s residence. I’m Guinevere Guinness.”

“Thank you, Miss Guinness,” Congreve said, bowing slightly and favoring her with his most sparkling smile. “An honor.”

“Yes, honored,” Hawke said, inwardly wincing at the young woman’s use of his title. Hawke had long discouraged anyone at all from using it. However, here at No. 10, everyone stood on ceremony.

“Gentlemen, if you’ll be so kind as to follow me upstairs? You’ll be in the Terracotta Room for just a few minutes. Meeting is starting a bit late, I’m afraid. The prime minister has a surprise visitor from Washington this morning. Let’s just take the stairs, shall we?”

The two men followed Miss Guinness’s decorous ascent up the grand staircase. The stairway was quite impressive, cantilevered as it was out of the curving wall with no visible means of support. On the pale yellow wallpaper to their left were hung black and white portraits of every prime minister, ascending in chronological order.

At the foot of the stairway, a giant globe, a gift from French president Mitterrand, Congreve had noted, and, on the wall, a small portrait of the first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Gaining the top, Congreve paused to point out that, by tradition, the prime minister in residence was never displayed.

“Really?” Hawke said, “I had no idea.”

Hawke smiled inwardly. Having known Ambrose since his own early childhood, he knew precisely what was going on here. This little history lesson was nothing but tit for tat. Ambrose was exacting his revenge for the upland game shooting lectures he’d endured from Alex the week prior. It wasn’t knowledge the man was doling out; it was retaliation.

“Here we are, then,” Miss Guinness said. “There’s tea, I believe…and cress sandwiches.”

“Lovely,” Congreve twinkled, touching the tip of his forefinger to his perfectly upturned moustache.

They were soon comfortably seated in the Terracotta Room on two facing Chippendale sofas, admiring the historic portraits hung on walls the color of warm brick. Tea had indeed been laid, and Alex let his eyes roam about the room while Ambrose poured. Every item in the room was polished or brushed or plumped to perfection. It was a room where foreign visitors to Downing Street might get some sense of Britain’s cultural heritage. Above a door, a gilt-framed portrait of Lord Nelson, who had defeated the French fleet at Trafalgar.

“Do you happen to know, Ambrose, the precise number of French soldiers required to defend the city of Paris?” Hawke asked.

“Why, no, I don’t.”

“No one does.”

“Why not?”

“It’s never been attempted,” Hawke deadpanned.

“Jolly good,” Congreve said, trying desperately not to laugh out loud. “I daresay, yes. Never been attempted, hah.” He looked up, and leapt to his feet.

At that moment, the American president strode into the room, a smile on his weathered, craggy face. He had the look of a man who’d spent most of his life at sea, which indeed he had, and yet somehow the ravages of wind and salt and sun had never managed to get to his sharp grey eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short and brushed back.

“Well! Look who we’ve got here! It’s young Alex Hawke! Good God, it’s great to see you, Hawkeye! I heard nagging rumors from Tex Patterson you were going to be here.”

Alex stood up and the two old friends shook hands warmly, then, after a moment’s hesitation, embraced each other, each clapping the other man soundly on the back.

“Mr. President, it’s good to see you again,” Hawke said, “Too damn long since we didn’t catch any bonefish in the Keys. Are you the surprise visitor? I understood that you were huddled at Camp David this weekend.”

“I am, at least as far as CNN is concerned,” President Jack McAtee said. “Came over last night. This thing has rapidly gone from bad to worse, as you know, Alex, so I’m glad you’re on board. Consuelo tells me you’re making significant progress.”

“I hope so, sir. You’ll see what we’ve got in the meeting.”

“Good, good. Now. Tell me. Who is your friend here? This isn’t the redoubtable Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve by any chance?”

Congreve shook the man’s hand. “How do you do, Mr. President. A very great honor to meet you, sir. A privilege, indeed.”

“A great pleasure to meet you at last, Chief Inspector. The legendary Congreve of Scotland Yard. There are endless tales about you from young Alex here. His secret weapon, he calls you, behind your back. His own personal demon of deduction and derring-do, isn’t that right, Alex?”

“Ambrose takes a mystery and bends it to his will, Mr. President,” Alex said with a tilt of his head.

Congreve sputtered, “Well, I hardly—”

“Wonderful meeting you, Inspector. You must come for a chili supper with Betsy and me at the White House sometime. I’ll get Hawkeye here to arrange it. Anyway, I’ve got five minutes alone with your PM before the meeting, Inspector. This thing is a certified bitch, as you gentlemen well know.”

The president turned away and, trailing secret service agents, headed for the door. Alex looked at Congreve and saw that, for the moment anyway, the man had been rendered speechless.

“Forty-fourth president of the United States,” Alex said to Ambrose, with a nod towards his departing friend’s back. “Lives in the White House, as you may know, one thousand six hundred Pennsylvania Avenue to be precise.”

Hawke looked away just in time to miss Congreve’s withering stare.

“Gentlemen, if you’ll come this way?” It was the comely staffer Guinevere and they gratefully followed in her silky wake down the elegant hallway to the Cabinet Room.

The room, with its long, boat-shaped table was full of buzzing H.M. government and American diplomats, plus high-ranking military and spook types from both sides of the pond. The only people Alex recognized instantly among the lumpy, bestriped crowd round the table were Conch and, right next to her, Texas Patterson. There were charts and maps projected on three monitors placed around the room. Hawke nodded at Tex and pulled an envelope containing two CD-ROM discs from his inside pocket, handing it to a junior man at the near end of the table. The discs represented everything Alex, Congreve, Tex, and the worldwide DSS team assembled at Hawkesmoor had learned in the last ten days.

The young man inserted the first disc into a slot on the laptop and began scrolling through aerial images of a mountain stronghold, adjusting color and contrast.

Conch came around from her seat opposite the door and shook hands warmly with Congreve, then, very professionally, with Hawke. She held his eyes a moment too long and Alex squeezed her hand gently before releasing it.

“Hello, heartbreaker,” she whispered.

“Hey, good-looking,” Hawke said under his breath.

“You have everything you need? Tough audience.”

“Yes, one hopes, thank you.”

After the secretary had made the more formal introductions, Alex and Ambrose took two empty chairs to her left. The seat opposite the fireplace was always, Alex knew, reserved for the PM. The chair beside that was being held for the American president.

“Let’s get started,” Conch said, remaining on her feet. “My boss will be here in a few minutes, but he told me to go ahead. He already knows what I’m going to say. Slide, please.”

On all three screens was a picture of an object very closely resembling an American-style football.

There were a few stifled chuckles and some not so sotto voce murmuring up and down the length of the table. Hawke heard his name mentioned. Something about his having handed over the wrong slides.

“Looks like a goddamn football to me,” said a four-star general with a heavy Texas drawl, and there was some snickering from the American contingent.

“Doesn’t it, though?” Conch said, “It’s not. It’s a linear implosion nuclear device containing a single critical mass of plutonium, or, U-233, at maximum density under normal conditions. It weighs only 10.5 kilograms and is 10.1 centimeters across. Fusion boosted, it is capable of destroying a city roughly the size of, oh, let’s just say for argument’s sake, General, Fort Worth, Texas.”

“Still looks like a football,” the general muttered.

“Dr. Bissinger?” Conch said, nodding at a rumpled old gentleman seated across the table who had his nose buried in a book.

“Sorry?”

“Linear implosion?” Conch said, smiling at him and nodding at the football on the screens. “Could you enlighten us?”

“Ah, yes-s-s-s,” the rumpled man said, getting slowly to his feet. With a quick underhand toss, he flipped a silver mock-up of the Pigskin to the startled general. “Good catch! This is the design approach known as ‘linear implosion.’ ”

Dr. H. Gerard Bissinger, the American Undersecretary for Nuclear Affairs, was a gangly bespectacled former Harvard professor. Known in Washington circles as the “Bomb Babysitter,” he was charged with knowing the precise whereabouts of every nuke on the planet.

“Slide?” Bissinger said. “In laymen’s terms, the weapon the general is holding, shown here in cross-section, is capable of being fielded with a ‘neutron bomb’ or enhanced radiation option. Simply put, the ‘linear implosion’ concept is that an elongated, or ‘football-shaped’ lower density subcritical mass of material can be compressed and deformed into a higher density spherical configuration by embedding it in a cylinder of explosives which are initiated at each end, thus squeezing the fissle mass to the center into a super-critical shape.”

“Say what?” the American general said.

“Beg pardon?” Bissinger said.

“Excuse me all to hell, Doc,” the American general said, “but if that’s layman talk, I guess I ain’t a layman. Does anybody in this room know what the hell this man said?”

Alex couldn’t help himself. With a slight cough, he took the floor and all eyes were on him.

“In a vernacular you might well understand, General,” Hawke said evenly, “Dr. Bissinger has just informed you that it’s very late in the fourth quarter and the opposing team has the ability to throw the long bomb.”

“The long bomb?” the general asked, turning the silver football in his hands.

“Precisely,” Alex Hawke said. “The ultimate ‘Hail Mary,’ as it were, General.”